My phone Rings on Friday and it is a PR company who got referred to me by a friend, thanks Joel.

They ask me if I am available to shoot monday, I am, sounds good, portrait type shots of three people for a couple ads running in the Australian paper. They tell me that they will send over the brief soon, it comes in, and then my phone rings again, one of the people cant make it on monday, and can I shoot him, like right now.

So I start scrambling around, collecting gear, from my desk, from my little studio, from the car, and start lamenting how when I set up lights in the studio, I leave them up, instead of packing them up when Im done.

So I get everything I can think of and throw it in the car, and head off to the location, which I dont know very well, which is why I brought everything, I pick up my assistant on the way, she reads the brief to me while we drive, yeah it was that last minute.

I decided to shoot natural light, because it was 5pm, and if I wanted to get a couple of looks done, I was going to have to work fast before I lost all the light, and the brief wanted shots that could be cropped short and wide like the first example above.

We managed to get shots in a few locations, but as it turned out the first place we went turned out the best, and the first shot out of the camera ended up being the clients pick.

I relaxed a bit, and went home and thought about lighting and locations, and the nervous tick of fear about monday because I didnt know who I was lighting, how I was lighting, or even where I was lighting, I just knew that I couldnt shoot in same place, the shots all had to be in different locations.

Shoot two started 9 am, and all my planning went out the window, as I drove by the local market which was closed, and offered a range of different colored corrugated steel roller doors, and that became location 1, we had two good sides, one partially lit with silver doors, and one side all shade with cream doors and

brick, shot almost exclusively natural light, with a few shots with a soft box camera right filling in the shadows.

Second location I decided I head over to a lane way where Drew Funk, a graffiti artist I shot a couple months ago did some work, and there was a popular cafe, St Ali, and I figured between the cafe and the graffiti that Id get a couple different backgrounds. Like the last I shot almost all natural light and occasionally pulled out the soft-box for a little bit of fill.

It was a liberating break from how I have been working, where everything was thought out before hand, lighting planned, location scouted, time of day taken in to account, this was running and gunning, when an idea didnt work I just scrapped it and moved to the next look, it was a lot of fun, a big thanks to the great people at Haystac, and Ill be sure to post the final artwork for the ads when they come through.